Drove down to Turangi for the weekend and did the loop around Lake Rotopounamu on the way through. It is one of those walks that never seems to come up when people list North Island day walks, which is a shame, because it is probably the easiest one I have done that actually feels like you went somewhere.
The walk in
The track starts off State Highway 47, the road that runs over the Pihanga Saddle between Turangi and the rest of Tongariro National Park. The carpark is small and gives no sign of the lake at all. You drop down through bush for about ten minutes before the track flattens out and starts following the shoreline.
The bush on the way in is the kind you do not see much of further north. Tall beech, ferns everywhere, and a damp green smell that suggests it has been there a long time. It had rained the night before so the path was slick in a few places, but nothing you would call a problem.
The lake
The lake itself is small. Roughly a square kilometre, nine metres at the deepest. The backstory is where it gets interesting. Most of the lakes around this part of the country were made by volcanoes blowing things up and leaving holes. Rotopounamu was made by a landslide, about ten thousand years ago, which came down off the side of Mount Pihanga and left a funnel-shaped valley that slowly filled with water. Seven streams run into it. None run out. The water leaves through the ground somewhere, which is the kind of fact that sounds made up but is not.
Pounamu is the Maori word for greenstone. On a sunny day the water apparently lives up to its name. We got a flat overcast morning instead, so the lake was more silver than green, sitting completely still. I think I prefer it this way. It feels older.
Pihanga
Pihanga, the mountain you are basically walking on the side of, has its own story. It is a dormant volcano, last erupted somewhere north of twenty thousand years ago, and in Maori legend it is also the reason Mount Taranaki sits all the way over on the west coast. The version I have heard goes that all the central mountains were once standing together in the middle of the island. Tongariro, Ruapehu, Ngauruhoe, Taranaki, the lot of them. They all wanted Pihanga, and Tongariro won the fight. Taranaki took off west and gouged the Whanganui River out of the land on the way. Stand on the lake edge long enough and you can see how a story like that gets started.
The first proper beach is about ten minutes in and is called Ten Minute Beach, which is admirably literal. We saw one other couple the whole walk and a few ducks that did not seem too fussed about us being there. The full loop is about 5km and takes around an hour and a half if you actually stop and look.
The wind picked up briefly at one of the beaches and you could hear the water moving against the sand from much further away than seemed reasonable. Cold enough that the jacket was earning its keep.
The birds
The bush closes back in for the second half of the loop. One short climb, nothing that gets the heart going. The other thing you start to notice is the birds. There are a lot of them, far more than you would expect for somewhere this close to a state highway, and that is not an accident. DOC and a local conservation group have been running a serious pest control project here for years. Traps, bait stations, the occasional 1080 drop. The rats, stoats, possums and weasels are mostly gone now, and you can hear the result before you see it. Robin and rifleman mostly, with the occasional kereru crashing through the canopy like it has somewhere important to be.
By the time we got back to the car we had stopped maybe four or five times just to stand and look at the water for no particular reason.
Worth the detour.